Apple is also holding special events at several of its larger Apple Stores around the world. Visitors to the Apple Store in New York's SoHo district, for instance, can listen to Hopscotch CEO Jocelyn Leavitt on December 10, and TouchPress co-founder Theodore Gray is scheduled to speak at Apple's Chicago store on December 8. For those who can't make it, Apple has curated a collection of apps, books and podcasts on coding in the Apple Store.

The code education push is spearheaded by Code.org, which launched in early 2013. Since then, more than 53 million students have participated in the Hour of Code, creating more than 3 billion lines of programming. Those participants are split almost evenly by gender, with 51 percent boys and 49 percent girls.

Code.org estimates that 1.4 million computer science jobs will be available in the next decade, with only 400,000 American graduates qualified enough to fill them.

Editor's note: This article originally stated that Apple didn't participate in the Hour of Code in 2013, which it did. It's been updated to fix that and we apologize for the error.

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